I want to get another battery for my ebike but everything I’ve seen online ships from China and I’m worried about getting scammed/wrong product.
The company I bought my bike from is in America and they won’t ship batteries into Canada.
My battery is a silverfish style with a 4 pin connector port, a canon head charger port and it’s dimensions are 390mm X 75mm X 110 mm.
It’s 48v 15AH.
Any help would be appreciated.
I’m sorry to hear about your series of unfortunate mishaps. That said, I’d be cautious about buying a second battery when you haven’t quite fully discharged the current battery. Using your existing battery is the best way to gauge what your real-life distance will be, and then you can use that figure to determine if you want the second – or maybe even third? – battery.
Most people will do a series of longer and longer rides, usually out-and-back trips. This helps get a sense for how low the battery level drops. At some point, it will be too low for “comfort” and that’s when the battery should be considered range-tested.
This “comfort” level is different for everyone, since some people only count the battery as useful if they can still hold cruise at 32 kph (20 mph). Other people might draw the line when they’re noticeably sweaty from having to help limp the bike home. Yet more people just simply look at when the battery meter moves into the red zone.
There are no wrong answers to the comfort question, but buying another battery without establishing your baseline range is like putting the cart before the horse.
IME, the difference between a bad headwind and a good tailwind can be like a factor of 3 in terms of battery consumption for a given route.
While that might be true for some very gnarly air speeds approaching 10-20 knots, riding out-and-back would tend to cancel out most – but not all – of the windage effects. And such winds would almost certainly be noticed as a caveat to the ride data.
Certainly, I wouldn’t recommend drawing conclusions from a few or even a single data point. It’s an ebike, so going for multiple rides shouldn’t be laborious and in-fact should be quite fun.
I mostly just use my bike for commutes and charge in the middle. So, the one-way matters. But sometimes, I can drain like 80% of the battery going one-way and other times its like 20%. Of course this will depend on how much assist you use. With a good tailwind, I’m pedaling hard enough the assist might do very little outside of accelerating after stopping. With a bad headwind, the assist might be at/near 750W nearly constantly (and still sometimes dipping down below 20mph) and my contribution is pretty negligible. I do live in a relatively flat area nearish to the coast… so winds speeds might be a bit more variable here.